Thing #15

I read "Away from the Icebergs", "Into a New World of Librarianship", and "More Powerful Ways to Cooperate".

In "Away", I agreed with Rick Anderson in that we need to shift the modes of our service to work with us instead of against us. I've heard and seen the result of the collections that bog us down, to the point that our library recieves VHS tapes from the other, smaller branches that it just doesn't have room to shelve. If there weren't as big of a non-fiction collection, maybe there would be more space for the types of materials that customers check out more frequently. On the other side of that issue, not everyone has a computer and access to the internet, or training on how to research things in a format other than books. Much more training would have to be done in order to eliminate the collection excess.

"New World" had some good points, and it's funny, but I think that our director must have either read this article long ago or was the example for the librarian 2.0, because she's got those pointers on lock down! It's very important for us all to reach out to our customers and be available to them in the growing points of contact.

The "Powerful" article was a little more difficult to digest, mainly because of the grandiosity of what OCLC is attempting to accomplish. I think that it's going to be just amazing when one can search for a book and have all the libraries that own it in the world come up. As someone who doesn't do acquisitions, it's harder to envision all the ways in which this will simplify our jobs, but from a customer standpoint, it is looking pretty excellent.